Scarica Charles Dickens' Critique of Industrialization: A Look into 'Hard Times' and Coketown e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! CHARLES DICKENS The industrialization in England, started in the eighteenth and continued in nineteenth century, caused a radical change to working habits and ways of life. They lived in conditions of extreme poverty, and Charles Dickens grew up among the most intensive stage of England’s industrialization. Growing older and becoming a writer, he refuses the money making and profit orientated society more and more. This critical attitude to people’s pursuit of money is represented in his novel “Hard Times”, that he wrote in 1854. We are in the years of the Victorian age and we are in front of one of the authors who more than anyone else has tried, through the written word, to express all that he didn't share the world in which he lived. In this novel he blames the social differences in the then-society and in the then-life in a satiric and as well melodramatic way. The novel shows the struggle of the factory workers and lower class people in everyday life, and the struggle for social status, etiquette, money and power of the middle and higher class, which is represented in “Hard Times’ by Mr Bounderby and the Grandgrind family. COKETOWN Coketown is the most incisive metaphor produced by Charles Dikens to describe the negative aspects of industrialization. This text deals with the description of the industrial centre Coketown, an imaginary town where the wholes story is set and where Mr Gradgrind and his friend Mr Bounderby are now walking. They're the two gentlemen at this present moment. In the first part of description is based on the lower classes, while the second part is based on the comforts of the upper ones. Indeed, in the first part it deals with pollutions and dirt, while in the second part it deals with the comforts and elegance of life, which gives an idea of the well-off life conditions opposed to the exploitation and precarious ones of the lower class. After introducing, Dickens describes the city form a materialistic point of view by using the impression of sense. This town is considered a triumph of facts : this means that it’s based on the production, they produced and had to produce more and more. Everything had a price and what didn't have a price should not exist. Everything was related to work and production. (Example of the members of a religious sect). It's a town of red bricks, which are not red anymore because of the smoke and pollution which has made them black, they are compared to the painted face of savage that gives the idea of danger and chaos. (You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful) Its also a town of tall chimneys and machinery out of which serpents of smoke come out, image which brings the idea of a very polluted town. Everything in Coketown is based on facts and look alike: there is no difference between a jail and hospital. All the buildings are square, made of red bricks painted black and white, which gives a sense of monotony. In fact, in Coketown people are alienated, they all live in the same houses, walk the same streets at the same time, work in the same place and do the same things everyday. With this description of the town, the narrator communicate the monotony and the sadness of the life in this town. (As yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next) The only exception , among all the same buildings, was the New Church, that was built differently with different colors, but only few people went there. People have lost their personality and individuality: they are equally like one another and look like machines. Finally Dickens says that everything is based on facts, and if it's not based on facts it's based on statistics. From Coketown we get the impression that Dickens sees the man as the one who wants to get, from the industrial society, only the profit. Feelings don't matter if they don't bring profit. He is used to basing his narrative stories on the realism of the time, inventing places and people. In fact, he makes a criticism of the little importance at the time of spiritual and moral values.
